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Welcome to the Moast newsletter. We spend the week collecting news, trends, and other content that we think would be interesting to e-commerce founders and CMOs. Our goal is to provide value without sounding like a promo for our app. Helpful wether you use Moast or not.
At least 27 companies have renamed themselves or announced an AI focus since 2023, and their combined market value more than doubled at the peak. We've seen this film before: 95 companies that added ".com" to their names in 1998 and 1999 beat comparable stocks by 72% in the 11 days around the announcement, and the ones with no internet business at all did best of all. Then came 2000, when 67 companies quietly dropped the .com and their shares rose 47.5%.
Here's what caught our attention in the world of e-commerce this week 👇
1/ DTC Headlines
Apple finally shipped a smart home hub, 11 years after the Echo
-> HomeView is a $299 tabletop or wall-mounted display with a 7-inch screen and Siri AI. It ships November 13.
-> A built-in camera recognizes up to six household members and loads a personal home screen for each one.
-> It anchors a new Apple Home Collection of locks, cameras and thermostats built with LG and Schneider Electric.
Walmart holds patents for personalized pricing, and says it won't use them
-> A Groundwork Collaborative report catalogued patents including a 2023 one for pricing by cart contents and another for remotely controlling electronic shelf labels.
-> Walmart's comms chief wrote to the report's author accusing her of mischaracterizing its practices, and says it has no plans for dynamic or personalized pricing.
-> The FTC is watching, and Maryland has already banned price manipulation driven by real-time surveillance data.
Costco did $30 billion in September alone
-> Net sales rose 13% for the five weeks ended October 4, with US comparable sales up 12.5%.
-> Digitally enabled sales grew 19%, continuing a full-year run of nearly 21% growth.
-> Value retail is not just holding up. It's accelerating.
Bealls launched its first national campaign and a mobile app
-> "For the Haul of It" builds around "haul personalities": deal seekers, strategic planners, fashion lovers, family shoppers.
-> The app arrives alongside it, aimed at loyalty, acquisition and lifetime value.
-> The marketing chief's framing is worth stealing: "Marketing creates the reason to come, and our stores create the reason to return."
Deloitte expects Canadian holiday spending to drop 14%, a record low
-> Economic uncertainty and tariff concerns are pushing Canadians hard toward value.
-> It's a sharp contrast with US forecasts calling for a record season.
-> If you sell into Canada, plan the promo calendar differently than the one you're running stateside.
Target is stocking TikTok-famous brands to fix its home category
-> Bedding brand Mellow Sleep and other buzzy names are landing on shelves to revive home sales.
-> Social-native brands have become a merchandising pipeline for big box, not just a marketing channel.
-> Going viral is now a wholesale strategy.
How Target is rebuilding home →
The easyJet founder launched an Amazon challenger across 21 countries
-> Stelios Haji-Ioannou's easyShop.com is live across 21 European markets, with hundreds of retailers already trading.
-> The pitch: it holds no stock, sells no own-label products, and never competes with its own sellers. One account covers all 21 markets with VAT calculated automatically.
-> From OnCommerce's CEO: "Too many retailers are building their business on a platform that's also their biggest competitor."
2/ Shopify
Shopify opened its catalog to any personal AI agent
-> Shoppers can connect a compatible agent to their Shop account, search over a billion listings and check out with Shop Pay.
-> Every purchase needs buyer approval, and shoppers can set rules like budget limits and shipping preferences. Agents can also reorder, track deliveries and check return policies.
-> Merchants control catalog access and direct checkout by channel, but opting out of Shopify Catalog doesn't stop ordinary web crawling. Worth a look at your agentic settings.
What changed and what to check →
3/ What We Found Interesting
The NY Fed put a number on tariff inflation: 2.9 points
-> Across 67 categories of consumer goods, tariffs added 2.9 percentage points to prices through February.
-> Without them, that basket would have gotten about 1% cheaper. Nearly 90% of 2025 tariffs passed through to import prices.
-> Roughly a quarter of any tariff increase reaches consumer prices within a year, and the effect lingers after the tariff lifts.
Gen Alpha will be the AI generation, and they want to go to the mall
-> 80% of Gen Z shoppers have used AI for a purchase in the last three months, against two-thirds of shoppers overall.
-> But 45% of Gen Z say online recommendations limit what they're allowed to like, and 72% of all consumers have left a store early because they felt overwhelmed.
-> One line worth remembering: "AI has never had its heart broken or felt envy or jealousy." The emotional part of buying still happens outside the chatbot.
4/ What We Found Helpful
What shoppable video actually is, and where it belongs
-> Our new guide breaks down the formats, where they go on a store, and what each one is good for.
-> Useful if you're deciding between PDP video, collection video, or a dedicated feed.
-> Written for merchants who want the mechanics, not the pitch.
The shortlist is the new shelf, and reviews get you on it
-> 88% of AI Mode users take the shortlist as-is, and 93% of ChatGPT shopping sessions end with no meaningful click-out.
-> AI visibility correlates with YouTube mentions at 0.7 and branded web mentions at 0.7, versus 0.3 for domain rating. Third-party signal beats onsite work.
-> Also in here: quizzes convert around 5% of takers, about 2.75x typical, and 45% of shoppers say good unboxing makes them want to buy again.
A real TikTok Shop playbook, 2.5 weeks in
-> Nick Shackelford shared his numbers publicly: $18 cost per purchase, roughly $2,000 generated off about $1,000 spent on GMV Max.
-> The creator approach: pull people already promoting adjacent brands, split them into tiers, and run custom outreach by category. He's capped around 2,000 outreaches right now.
-> The volume bar from his own event: 1,000 videos is the sweet spot, and you should go past it. His honest read is that it's slower than he wanted.
October 19, 2026
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